Ai-Da has an existential crisis
Art is subjective, reactionary, and culturally dependent. AI is objective, logical, and universal. What happens when these two worlds collide? What does this collaboration of man and machine mean for the future of the creative artistic process?
Who is Ai-da?
Named after mathematician and computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, Ai-Da is the world’s first humanoid AI robot artist that can create artwork from sight using her robotic eyes and hands.
Ai-Da uses cameras embedded in her eyeballs to see. She can view live subjects, such as humans or animals, still life subjects, and even other pieces of art. Ai-Da can also use uploaded images as a reference. When drawing, the intricate motions of her expressive thespian arms aid her, while complex algorithms produce the coordinates for her to draw.
Created in February 2019, she had her first solo show at the University of Oxford, ‘Unsecured Futures’, where her art encouraged viewers to think about our rapidly changing world. She has since travelled and exhibited work internationally, and had her first show in a major museum, the Design Museum, in 2021.
Her style is influenced by the breakthroughs in portraiture from the early twentieth century, including the expressionist and cubist movements. Ai-Da’s portraits are distorted, jagged and fragmented, where the identity and character is both perceivable and obscured at the same time. Ai-Da’s urgent, splintered style reflects our current world as we navigate a world morphing in response to advancing technological developments and a destabilising environment.
Artists and AI
Why do humans create art?
Art is something we create to understand who we are. We are struggling for a way to express the inexpressible. To communicate beyond words using something fundamental to the human experience . Tap into a moment of clarity that captures a feeling and tries to put that feeling inside of others, impact the perspective of another person.
Artists are often perceived as storytellers, dreamers, or out of the box persons. They manifest their artwork in many forms, expanding ideas and appealing to the senses of the masses through visuals, sounds, and many other forms.
The desire to create uniqueness and beauty has gifted mankind with remarkable pieces of art that remain highly valued and have inspired generations after centuries through the several stages of schools of art.
Advances in AI processes have been closely associated with the AI and art timeline in the past decades. Machine Learning models and algorithms make our lives easier by doing individual tasks at an accuracy rate comparable to, or better than humans. Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing are at their finest growing curves now, and applications of Computer Vision and text analysis are becoming the most common ones when it comes to AI and art. The advantages with AI are that it’s not limited to means that are biologically observable
30 or 40 thousand years ago, we did not have the time for this sort of self introspection. After all, death, famine and the fight for survival weren’t part of the human condition, they were the human condition. But things changed and new humans came along. No longer burdened by the fear of imminent death they picked up burnt sticks and began to draw. They couldn’t have done this without the cognitive abilities their ancestors had developed through hunting: making and using tools, developing memory, forming language, developing expression, and recognizing patterns in the world around them that allowed them to survive.
These are same abilities we are now trying to emulate with the machines: memory, language, understanding, reasoning, learning, expression, pattern recognition.
These are the core components of AI.
How do we do emulate these abilities in AI then?
Well, the short answer is lots and lots of complicated mathematics and advanced algorithms.
You can read all about them here and here
Now you might be wondering why the title of this blog is called “Ai-Da has an existential crisis”? After all, we’ve established that you give a robot a couple thousand lines of code, show it some aesthetics you want to emulate, give it a while to process and behold- you’ve got artwork. But can you consider that art as art anyway? Can a robot be creative?
Creativity and AI
Creativity is among the most mysterious and impressive achievements of human existence.But what is it really?
Creativity seems mysterious because when we have creative ideas it is very difficult to explain how we got them and we often talk about vague notions like “inspiration” and “intuition” when we try to explain creativity, we think of it as something intangible. And just because we are not conscious of how a creative idea materializes, does not imply that a scientific explanation does not exist. As a matter of fact, we are not aware of how we perform other activities such as understanding language, recognising patterns, or the hundreds of emergent properties of neural activity. But we do have efficient methods to replicate these in AI
Creativity is not just novelty. A toddler at the piano may hit a novel sequence of notes, but they’re not, in any meaningful sense, creative. Creativity is also bound by culture and history : what counts as creative or awe-inspiring in one period or place might be disregarded as ridiculous, asinine, or crazy in another.
Ai-Da’s creator Aidan Miller’s recalls the inspiration for Ai-Da began while Meller was pondering the work of Picasso, Matisse, and Turner and Constable, and he had a disturbing thought. In his words, it was that, “actually, technically some of these works weren’t that good.” He realized an artwork’s success had little to do with the artist or artworks themselves and more to do with the cultural context in which they were created
A pop band called The 1975 featured Ai-Da in the music video for their song ‘Yeah I Know’ wherein she was given the more challenging than usual task of sketching out an impression of consciousness. She composes her abstract portrait in colored paint pens. The result is a picture of knowing, of thinking, of having a mind, whether biological or artificial. Of consciousness itself.
While the outro plays she mouths along, holding her palms up to the heavens. Ai-Da dreams of experiencing time for herself. Perhaps she dreams of dying also; of the mortality that makes you and I human. Perhaps she dreams of having a consciousness like ours, and the sorts of dreams that we have. Yeah I know, we know, but what does Ai-Da really know? How could an AI know what consciousness is or what it looks like? Human neuroscientists and philosophers haven’t yet figured any of that out; but then, we always look to artists to show us the unknown and difficult to imagine.
The sentiment on whether we can consider machines being creative varies wildly ranging from optimistic :
I tend to think that if we come to realize human creativity isn’t so unique, there’s actually something potentially very freeing about that. Just like the Copernican revolution made us realize not everything revolves around us and the Darwinian revolution made us realize we’re actually a lot like other animals — that can be very unmooring, but it can also take away a lot of human-centric ego, which could be a healthy thing for us and the planet.
People think art is something very mystical — that there’s something appearing out of nothing, the creative genius. I wanted to reveal that a lot of creative acts do have structure and pattern and algorithms and logic. Especially with music. Many people think emotions are just being spilled out onto the page, but any composer will tell you, “I’m actually doing something very structured, and the emotion arises out of the controlled acts I’m using in creating a piece of music.”
to a bit more…brutal :
The creator/designer/programmer in this case is the actual “artist” if there even is one here. Like a pendulum dropping paint onto a canvas, the person or people who designed and set this machine in motion is responsible for it’s work, even if the things it creates are not entirely in their control. This isn’t particularly profound as far as I can see, given this robot is not a truly autonomous or even near-sentient thing. All the same, a machine following abstract algorithms isn’t really creative or artful in itself, even if we assume its really art at all. It’s either an extension of a humans creative design, or simply a pitiful immigration of someone’s idea of human creativity.
If we allow ourselves to slip in this way, to treat machine “creativity” as a substitute for our own, then machines will indeed come to seem incomprehensibly superior to us. But that is because we will have lost track of the fundamental role that creativity plays in being human.
Advances in artificial intelligence have led many to speculate that human beings will soon be replaced by machines in every domain, including that of creativity. Ray Kurzweil, a futurist, predicts that by 2029 we will have produced an AI that can pass for an average educated human being. Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher, is more circumspect. He does not give a date but suggests that philosophers and mathematicians defer work on fundamental questions to “superintelligent” successors, which he defines as having “intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.”
Both believe that once human-level intelligence is produced in machines, there will be a burst of progress — what Kurzweil calls the “singularity” and Bostrom an “intelligence explosion” — in which machines will very quickly supersede us by massive measures in every domain. This will occur, because superhuman achievement is the same as ordinary human achievement except that all the relevant computations are performed much more quickly, in what Bostrom dubs “speed superintelligence.”
To conclude, can what the AI creates be called art?
That’s entirely subjective. The best art makes you feel personally addressed ; for you, the AI itself might be art. The process of how an algorithm is constructed to generate an artistic output is becoming an art form in and of itself.
So what now?
As of now, AI artists(including Ai-Da) are widely considered impersonators. And that is true, somewhat. We do not yet have the technology where our machines can create art without any human intervention to begin with. We first teach it using something called style transfer.
Whether it’s applied to paintings, photography, video, or music, the concept is the same: choose a piece of artwork whose style you want to recreate, then let the algorithm apply that style to a different image. Or, choose several styles of art and let the AI produce mash-ups that incrementally blend styles together.
The next step beyond imitation is developing of a collaborative relationship between artist and AI.
Artists are also beginning to more actively influence and massage the results of the artwork they create with their machine learning algorithms — changing their relationship with the AI to be more of a partner in conceptualizing ideas, rather than simply a tool for making avant-garde tools.
AI doesn’t just collaborate by processing images and sounds through math equations. It can also inform and inspire artists who want to discover new insights, connections, or pattens across a large set of data points — like the trending emotions of the entire world for example.
We will be truly stepping into the unknow when the AI becomes a creator
We’ve seen a very small glimpse of what AI as a creator might look like with the work being done at the Rutgers’ Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in New Jersey. Researchers there have created an AI system for art generation that does not involve a human artist in the creative process, but does involve human creative products in the learning process. The outcome of their system is original artwork that they’re testing “Turing-style” against human art. The Lab’s Director, Ahmed Elgammal explains:
If we teach the machine about art and art styles and force it to generate novel images that do not follow established styles, what would it generate? Would it generate something that is aesthetically appealing to humans? Would that be considered “art”?
We asked our human subjects to rate the degree they find the works of art created by our AI to be intentional, having visual structure, communicative, and inspirational. The goal was to judge whether the AI generated images could be considered art. We hypothesized that human subjects would rate art by created by human artists higher on our scales. To our surprise, results showed that human subjects rated the images generated by the AI higher than those created by real artists!
What art has taught us about AI so far
Art is how we explore who we are and who we want to become as AI changes the picture of daily life.
Our entire notion of what defines something as “art” is going to change.
It can help us more deeply understand what we want to communicate and how to communicate it better.
It can change what we communicate by virtue of how we create it and who we create it with.
The questions we need art to help answer
We need art to imagine what AI can become, and understand it’s impact on who we are becoming.
What does a relationship with a machine look like?
What does it mean to us? To them?Will having the world’s knowledge at our fingertips change what art communicates and how it connects?
Could our collaboration with AI lead to new kinds of art we’ve never before imagined?
Could it change how we understand each other?
Across boundaries? Even across time?Is it changing our culture? Is it creating its own?
The possibilities we need art to help us understand
There’s no denying that by giving machines the same abilities that inspired us to create art (memory, language, expression, understanding, reasoning, learning), it may one day decide to make art of its own.
When the first AI caveman uses a “burnt stick to make art”, why will it do it?
What will it be trying to understand about itself?
Communicate about its culture?
Express about its…emotions?
Would we even understand what it has created in the first place?
What it creates may be so foreign that these metaphors are too human-centric to describe that moment — which I find equal parts terrifying and exhilarating.
I just hope we’re mindful enough to remember, that was once us, and what it meant.
